Amy Bradley’s brother defends family against homophobia allegations after Netflix documentary
The brother of Amy Bradley, the subject of the new Netflix documentary Amy Bradley is Missing, has come out in defense of his family against homophobia allegations.
The three-part docuseries details the disappearance of 23-year-old Amy from a Royal Caribbean cruise sailing from Aruba to Curaçao in March 1998. She has yet to be found and several theories about what happened to her are featured on the show. Some had speculated that her sexuality played a part in her case.
“Me and my family are getting killed. The Internet is a toxic place,” Brad Bradley told PEOPLE. “Over the years, we’ve grown some pretty thick skin, because, you know, there’s always that side, you have the side of prayers, and support, and love, and caring, and all that good stuff. And then you have people just trying to chew us up and spit us out.”
While the series sheds a light on the unsolved case, it also touches on Amy’s sexuality – and how her parents, Iva and Ron, at first struggled with acceptance when she came out as bisexual.
“So the picture that’s being painted online is that, you know, I’m this Trump-supporting, racist homophobe, and of course, she killed herself. Why would, you know, how could she live with a family like that?” her brother added.
The documentary revealed how just two months before the cruise, Amy had confessed over the phone to her girlfriend, Mollie McClure, that she had kissed someone else while drinking.
McClure, then 23, stopped taking Amy’s calls, prompting Amy to send her a “message in a bottle,” begging for forgiveness in a handwritten letter – which was given new meaning once she went missing during the family trip.
“If they’re gonna talk about her sexuality and out her – especially, obviously in this case where she has no voice to speak for herself – I thought it was important to at least, you know, share that with people, that the portrait was incomplete,” Brad said.
As her brother tells PEOPLE, Amy was bisexual and dating a man at the time she suddenly disappeared – a piece of information seemingly left out of the Netflix series.
“That was one thing that was excluded,” Brad said. “I mean, she did write her boyfriend a letter shortly before the cruise, saying that she kinda needed, wanted to take it slow, and kinda step back a little bit. And I do believe, you know, she had some intention of rekindling things with Mollie when she returned home, hence the message in the bottle, a month prior to the cruise.”
While Amy’s brother declined to identify the man she was dating, he called him an “awesome guy” who spent a lot of time with the family.
“And true, Amy dated women. She came out in 1995 and initially, you know, I never gave a crap,” he said.
“Again, that’s not me trying to argue she, she didn’t like women. My point was she wasn’t just gay. She was bisexual, had plenty of guys she dated over the years, and girls too,” Brad added.
Brad doubled down, saying his sister’s sexuality “didn’t bother me one bit.”
While he acknowledged that their parents were less accepting right off the bat, “that was well gotten over” by the time Amy disappeared.
“Her girlfriend spent the night at the house. We took her girlfriends on vacations with our family,” Brad said, noting he and McClure remain “good friends.”
“Always were, I really like her a lot. She was at our house last Easter, 2024,” he said.
Amy was last seen on the second day of the cruise, resting on the balcony of the ship after a night of dancing in its nightclub. By morning, she couldn’t be found. Her mysterious disappearance prompted an FBI investigation, which is still open.
In 2017, the FBI shared age-progressed photos of the missing woman, who is described as 5-feet 6-inches tall with brown hair. She has four tattoos: a Tasmanian Devil on her shoulder, the sun on her lower back, a Chinese symbol on her right ankle and a gecko on her stomach.
